From time to time we have posts from local members of the startup community that provide some great advice from a different perspective. Today’s post is from Dr. Andrea Belz, a long-time member of the Pasadena Angels, a local consultant and one of the brightest people I know (a CalTech PhD–what more can you say).  Although Andrea provides five simple questions to ask when commercializing university technology, these can also be applied to most startups—whether they get their start in academe or not.

     By Andrea Belz

Many entrepreneurs approach Angel groups and VCs with novel technologies and strong technical teams.  Unfortunately, they often “forget” to conduct any marketing research, mainly because they don’t understand how to do it.  Even worse, technical teams with strong resumes may attract plenty of funding, but eventually they may hit the wall (at investors’ expense) once everyone realizes that there is an interesting technology but no interest from the outside world.

This problem can be especially acute when the local community includes a strong research institution interested in technology commercialization.  People often underestimate the gap between the technology’s readiness to exit the university or research laboratory and its readiness for market.  This gap often takes five years to overcome.   Furthermore, technologists almost always underestimate the difficulty in selling anything – the hardest challenge in almost any organization is to get someone to write the first check.

Entrepreneurs should be sure to ask themselves a few key questions before pursuing a plan to commercialize technology, particularly with investors.  Investors can use these questions as a guide to the entrepreneur’s “coachability”.

1. Have you spoken with anyone that might be an end user of the product and lived in their world for a day?
2. Have you listened seriously to his/her feedback without foolishly discarding it (“They just don’t get it”)?
3. Do you tell people about your technology or about the benefits?  In other words, do you sell the drill or the hole?
4. Can you estimate the size of your market and have you found “low-hanging fruit”?
5. If the low-hanging fruit is not the first application you considered, are you willing to shift direction?

Tags: Andrea Belz, Technology Transfer, University Commercialization

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 6:27 pm and is filed under General, Product/Technology, Sales & Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.